All-purpose news and politics thread

[Iangould]

That's exactly the Tory line when talking about justifying the cuts here and it's mainly bollocks.

The situations in Greece and Great Brtiain are funamentally different which is why I've been criticising the Tories for their austerity program while supporting austerity in Greece.

Greece is at the point where the high level of the national debt and the high interest rates they need to pay mean there's a danger of the debt simply feeding on itself, of them being unable to raise enough money even to pay the interest on their debt.

When economists point that out they aren't "imposing" (to use a word you used in a different post) anything on Greece any more than your doctor imposes cancer on you.

[Iangould]

Their polices are failing. We're in a double dip recession and people are fed up with seeing wages go down and prices for everything go up, but it's ok because Dave and Nick had a photo op. Hey, it's the Olympics soon, that'll be a great thing to see when everyone's fed up and skint!

Nine men have been found guilty of grooming and sexual abuse, and the problem is this is going to give more fuel to the BNP and the EDL. The problem is that not all forces record ethnicity
and what data there is happens to be poor according to Channel 4 News. Sadly the whole argument over race ignores the fact there's a load of paedophile gangs grooming kids and that's the real problem.

Unless Britain differs from the rest of the world drastically, the real problem is sexual abuse within families and "paedophile gangs" are about as common as serial killers.

[cactusmaac]

[Iangould]

It's very easy to scapegoat corrupt politicians in Greece for lining their pockets.

But all of the money they pocketed only makes up for the tip of the iceberg of Greek debt.

A lot of the money they borrowed went to making expensive gifts to the electorate - from a ridiculous early retirement age, to an insane percent of well-paid government employees to the Olympics.

A much larger percentage of the Greek populace than just the corrupt ruling class enjoyed things that a country that produces so little and has so few natural resources should have made possible. And as long as they did, they kept said ruling class in power.

There's also a large extent to which the whole mess was nobody's fault.

As I've pointed out before, ECB monetary policy encouraged a boom in virtually all the smaller EU member states and factros outside th control of their governments (like northerners investing billions in retirement homes) fed that boom.

There are factors specific to Greece that made the situation worse but Spain, Portugal and the neo-liberals' pet Ireland all experienced much the same thing.

On the one hand you've got Greeks screaming about how the evil Germans are trying to take over their country on the other you've got Germans and others saying it's all the fault of the shiftless, lazy Greeks.

Sometimes shit happens and it's nobody's fault.

My take on all this is purely as an economist. A currency crisis coming on top of a banking crisis is about the worst thign imaginable for an economy. As I said before, take a look at the figures for the Asian Financial Crisis as just one example.

Almost anything, including really severe austerity measures is preferable to that.

In the case of Greece, they're still running a huge budget surplus - an outright default and an end to EU aid would end that almost overnight. It'd end it because the capacity to run a deficit would disappear along with the net E10-20 billion a year that the EU and IMF are currently pumping into the Greek budget.

At that point, Greece would have the choice of cutting all government expenditure by about 1/3 over and above what's already been cut or of simply printing money, resulting in hyperinflation.

[Iangould]

The BNP weren't going to last. The candidates they attract aren't exactly top-drawer.

Is UKIP particularly far-right? They seem like slightly nuttier, one-issue versions of the Tories a bit like the Greens are to Labour.

I can't recall anything really appalling said by any of their members in the recent past.

A couple of their candidates in the recent elections have made some pretty extreme statements.

A candidate for UKIP has compared Islam’s holiest book to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Political Scrapbook can reveal. Academic Julia Gasper — a former Westminster hopeful and current council candidate in Oxford – said the Koran was “fascist” and compared those who defend Islam to holocaust deniers.

A former UKIP parliamentary candidate and current Oxford City Council hopeful has said people who ‘choose’ to be gay should stop ‘complaining about persecution’ and start thanking straight people for giving birth to them.

Dr Julia Gasper was selected by UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party)to run for Parliament in 2010 in Oxford East and is now campaigning for election to the city council in next week’s elections, prompting a concerned resident to draw attention to her blog.

This month, UKIP, which advocates withdrawal from the European Union, overtook the Liberal Democrats in a national YouGov poll of voting intentions, though in more recent polls they have reverted to tying with the party.

In 2010, Dr Gasper said gay rights had “gone too far” and suggested homosexuality is a choice.

She also suggested a link between homosexuality and paedophilia should be examined when selecting gay couples to adopt a child.



A great deal of nonsense has been written about Anders Breivik, the man who ruthlessly attacked the ruling Norwegian Labour Party.
That pretty well everyone – myself not excluded – recoiled at his actions, does not belie the accuracy of Breivik's research and analysis in his 'manifesto', which is in line with most scholarship in respect of both PC and Islam.
It is clear that the mass of ordinary people are considered with utter contempt by the government-media-education uber-class across the Western world; this as the result of 'cultural Marxism'. So we are, in effect, 'at war' within our societies over PC, as Breivik claims.

The Woman Racket is a serious scientific investigation into one of the key myths of our age – that women are oppressed by the ‘patriarchal’ traditions of Western societies. Drawing on the latest developments in evolutionary psychology, Moxon finds that the opposite is true – men, or at least the majority of low-status males – have always been the victims of deep-rooted prejudice. As the prejudice is biologically derived, it is unconscious and can only be uncovered with the tools of scientific psychology.

The book reveals this prejudice in fields as diverse as healthcare, employment, family policy and politics: compared to the long and bloody struggle for universal male suffrage, women were given the vote ‘in an historical blink of the eye’.

[Iangould]

I can't link to the specific pages because it's a PDF but this youGov survey shows over 50% of the UKIP members think immigrants "are the major cause of crime in society" and over 80% feel personally threatened by Islam.

Around 20% believe non-whites are intellectually inferior and a similar proportion want immigrants deported.

[Iangould]

Is that in constant dollars?

[Matt Algren]

Bomber in Plot on U.S. Airliner Is Said to Be a Double Agent

WASHINGTON — The would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually a double agent who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.

In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the agent left Yemen, traveling by way of the United Arab Emirates, and delivered both the innovative bomb designed for his air attack and critical information on the group’s leaders to the C.I.A., Saudi and other foreign intelligence agencies.

After spending weeks at the center of the terrorist network’s most dangerous affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the agent provided critical information that permitted the C.I.A. to direct the drone strike on Sunday that killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the group’s external operations director and a suspect in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

He also handed over the bomb, designed by the group’s top explosives expert to be invisible to airport security, to the F.B.I., which is analyzing its properties.

Officials would not disclose the agent’s identity, nationality, or the intelligence service that recruited him, though they said it was not the C.I.A. The agent is now safe in Saudi Arabia, officials said. The bombing plot was kept secret for weeks by the C.I.A. and other agencies because they feared retaliation against the agent and his family.

Officials said Tuesday night that risk has now been “mitigated,” evidently by moving both the agent and his relatives to safe locations.

[Spike-X]

Nice work there.

[Iangould]

It's mathematically impossible for the Left Coalition to form anything approaching a majority government in Greece unless they include either Golden Dawn or one of the two major pro-sanity parties (New Democracy and PASOK.)

Even then, any coalition would have to include both the Communists on the left and the right-wing Independent Greeks.

(Actually there is one other possibility which is large numbers of individual MPs deserting PASOK or New Democracy. Since both parties have already suffered major defections in the last Parliament that seems unlikely.)

[Charles RB]

A force of 200 ex-rebels attacked the Libyan Prime Minister's office, demanding the compensation and medical treatment the NTC had promised to ex-rebels last year. They were driven off, with a security guard killed in the process.

The fact this happened at all says a lot about the NTC's ability to disarm and integrate the militias. (Also the problems with restarting the medical treatment program that was suspended due to corruption)

German police last night arrested Swiss national Sebastien N. , considered one of the most violent neo-nazis in Europe.

Hopefully a unit comprised solely of ethnic and religious minority officers, just as an "up yours".

And by the way all the money that the greek governments have loaned were not going for the prosperity of the people but for the prosperity of their pockets, with the full knowledge of germany.

Are your civil servants still being paid, your emergency services still operating, welfare programs still operating at all, the power still on?

Then no, the money given to your government is not simply going into "their pockets".

I'll just leave you with this:

First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

That is the dumbest thing you could have sent to a Jewish man.

And we have the BNP sitting on local councils and in the European Parliament. We have UKIP gaining support as the respectable face of far right politics. We can't exactly talk.

Actually, we can talk quite well: neither of those parties has been elected to Commons. That's more important than the council seats the BNP gained (which they've lost most of, they're down to three seats). Golden Dawn can have a say in national policy now, they can claim legitimacy (0 to 21 seats in one day).

And Golden Dawn is worse than UKIP. I don't like UKIP and they've gone some total cunts in the party and, as Ian shows, a lot of bigger cunts voting for them, but they aren't openly running on white power ideologies. Golden Dawn are an EDL who can now claim a democratic mandate.

Nine men have been found guilty of grooming and sexual abuse, and the problem is this is going to give more fuel to the BNP and the EDL. The problem is that not all forces record ethnicity
and what data there is happens to be poor according to Channel 4 News. Sadly the whole argument over race ignores the fact there's a load of paedophile gangs grooming kids and that's the real problem.

It also ignores that the Crown Prosecutor who re-opened the case - apparently as soon as he took the job and heard of it - is a fucking Asian man called Nazir Afzal.

(That's the other real problem - the CPS first knew about the gang's victims in 2008, but their man ruled that the victim would not be seen as a "credible" witness by a jury and let it go, making the crimes go on longer. Azfal has said she was credible and the original lawyer is being retrained, so this is a fuck-up)

[needler420]

[Shawn Hopkins]

You're posting an ad from guy who took third place in the 2010 Alabama governors race Republican primary why?

[Charles RB]

Syriza declares war on Ian's blood pressure:

The leader of Greece's left-wing Syriza bloc has said he will try to form a coalition based on tearing up the terms of the EU/IMF bailout deal.

Alexis Tsipras, whose bloc came second in Sunday's vote, said Greek voters had "clearly nullified the loan agreement".

...

Mr Tsipras made his position clear to reporters in a five-point plan:

* Cancelling the bailout terms, notably laws that further cut wages and pensions

Except according to Greek media, he's failed to get an agreement with the Communists for a coalition. So he's going to be stuffed, without them he'll struggle to outnumber New Democracy.

[Charles RB]

Surveys suggest that UK companies are actually optimistic about the economy.